OS: Running Ubuntu LTS 12.04. Background: I place my scroll bars to the left side of each window (if possible). In GNOME this works fine, meaning that in GNOME the mouse pointer tip stays within the desktop area. Problem: When I try to grab the vertical scroll bar (positioned to my left) of Firefox, I'm unable to grab the scroll bar. I have to jerk the mouse pointer back a few pixels in order to get hold of the scroll bar. This can bee seen visually, as the left vertical scroll bar highlights when the mouse tip pointer is over the scroll bar, and goes dark when it loses focus. I always try to get hold of the scroll bar by pushing my mouse as far to the left as possible. But then the mouse pointer ends up _outside_ (!) the scroll bar area. This is such a bad usability bug that I think it deserves to be put to severe, but I let you guys decide. I always read a lot of text in my browser and text starts from left (then goes to the right across the screen). This means that I want text, mouse pointer and vertical scroll bar to be to the left at all times. ---- Picture included: I've included screen shots of the mouse pointer to the left corner of the screen of Firefox (numbers should be read left to right over the cut out screen shots of the corners): (1) Firefox - mouse pointer close to the right side of the vertical left scroll bar, upper left corner. Scroll bar is dark grey. (2) Firefox - mouse pointer hovers over the vertical left scroll bar, upper left corner. Scroll bar highlights into light grey color. (3) Firefox - mouse pointer to the far left of the vertical left scroll bar, upper left corner. Scroll bar is again dark grey - meaning "disabled". Compare this to the two pictures of Chromium's upper right corner, where the vertical scroll bar is to the far right: (4) Chromium - mouse pointer close to the left side of the vertical _right_ scroll bar, upper right corner. Scroll bar is dark grey. (5) Chromium - mouse pointer hover over the vertical _right_ scroll bar, upper right corner. Scroll bar highlights into light grey color. Further, notice that in the example picture attached, that the mouse pointer can't be moved completely to the right. Conclusion: It seems that the active area of the mouse pointer is wrongly offset one (?) pixel to the left over the whole desktop area. This is a bad usability problem as the user constantly has to jerk the mouse each time the pointer misses the left vertical scroll bar. This problem doesn't exist in GNOME. Personal Thoughts: I used GNOME before, but GNOME 3 is terrible, so I need some better window manager. I tried XFCE, but this bug is so severe to me that I'm considering looking for something where I don't have to constantly jerk the mouse to get the pointer correctly placed over the scroll bar. Besides that, thanks for providing an alternative to the mess GNOME 3 has become.
Created attachment 4613 Cut out screen shots of Firefox and Chromium corners
The window manager does not set the device area. I suspect this is not a bug, but a side effect of the /sidewalk/ windows used by xfwm4 to detect and compute the number of move actions when the mouse pointer reaches the screen edge when "Wrap workspaces when the pointer reaches the screen edge". Simply open the xfwm4-settings, go to "Advanced" tab and uncheck "Wrap workspaces when the pointer reaches the screen edge". Does that work then?
Olivier Fourdan, doing that setting was absolutely terrible as it just moved me into the next workspace, when moving the mouse pointer to the left border, which effectively made me exit the workspace I wanted to stay in. So, no, that doesn't work.
Olivier Fourdan, if you can't reproduce this bug because you can't put the vertical scroll bar to the left in Firefox, instead try using GNOME Terminal. GNOME Terminal is my preferred terminal and I have placed the scroll bar on the left side. Then maximize GNOME Terminal and see the effect. Same buggy behavior as in Firefox.
(In reply to comment #3) > doing that setting was absolutely terrible as it just > moved me into the next workspace, when moving the mouse pointer to the > left border, which effectively made me exit the workspace I wanted to > stay in. Well it means the option was not enabled and you enabled it (In reply to comment #4) > if you can't reproduce this bug because you can't put the > vertical scroll bar to the left in Firefox, instead try using GNOME Terminal. I cannot reproduce the problem you are reporting here, but again, the window manager does not define the pointer area. Beside, from the screenshot you provided, it looks like the screen is shifted by 1 pixel, that's not something the window manager does at all. What x11 driver do you use? Have you tried on some other hardware? Have you tried with another window manager such as metacity (from a terminal, type metacity --replace) PS: Repeating my full name in each post is not necessary.
Could be related to the WM theme maybe, have you tried with another theme?
I entered through Application Menu -> Settings -> Settings Manager -> Appearance and started fiddling around. Yes it seems related to some kind of "theme", whatever that is. I could not figure out what my inital (default) setting was, as nothing was marked as selected, so I couldn't return to my original theme. But a lot of those "Appearance" themes had a small border to the left of the left-vertical-scrollbar, which made the mouse end up outside the scrollbar button, when pulled to the far left. This must be a bug in terms of Appearance design. Some themes have this bug, others have it not. For example "Industrial" works fine, but theme "Light-Industrial" has this miss-the-scrollbar-bug. I think this problem should at least be adressed as and improvement, so future new users doesn't have to run into it. No themes should be allowed to missbehave. Some scrollbars don't even highlight when I do mouse-over. Thanks for your help.
I would like to add that "Mist" is one of the better themes, utilizing the desktop to its most, and making the scrollbar behave correctly. If any guidelines would be written for addressing this problem, that is one theme to get ideas from.
Actually the themes themeselves are not the root of the problem, the design of some of them simply trigger another issue with some recent combination of Xorg/driver. What Xorg card/driver do you use?
I'm not sure what to provide, these commands are what I found from a net search: > lspci -nn | grep VGA 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV620 LE [Radeon HD 3450] [1002:95c5] > egrep -i "connected|card|primary" /var/log/Xorg.0.log [ 21.769] (II) RADEON(0): PCIE card detected [ 21.769] drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0 [ 21.891] (II) RADEON(0): Default color space is primary color space [ 21.900] (II) RADEON(0): Output VGA-0 connected [ 21.900] (II) RADEON(0): Output DIN disconnected [ 21.900] (II) RADEON(0): Output HDMI-0 disconnected [ 21.900] (II) RADEON(0): Output VGA-1 disconnected (In the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log I also found:) [ 21.748] (II) LoadModule: "ati" [ 21.749] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so [ 21.749] (II) Module ati: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 21.749] compiled for 1.11.3, module version = 6.14.99 [ 21.749] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 21.749] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 11.0 [ 21.749] (II) LoadModule: "radeon" [ 21.749] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so [ 21.749] (II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 21.749] compiled for 1.11.3, module version = 6.14.99 [ 21.749] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 21.749] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 11.0 [ 21.749] (II) LoadModule: "vesa" [ 21.749] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so [ 21.749] (II) Module vesa: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 21.749] compiled for 1.11.3, module version = 2.3.0 [ 21.749] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 21.749] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 11.0 and also -> X.Org X Server 1.11.3 Release Date: 2011-12-16 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 xorg-server 2:1.11.4-0ubuntu10.7